Environmentalists and Farmers in Brazil’s Pantanal Team up to Protect Jaguars

By Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Environmentalists and farmers in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul are teaming up to protect the largest feline in the Americas: the endangered jaguar.

Shootings? Only by camera to get the best picture. On a farm in Miranda, the number of visitors to observe jaguars has increased by 120 percent in five years. And nine out of ten tourists get to see the queen of the Pantanal wetlands, the world’s largest.

Tourism generates over R$22 (US$5.5) million per year in the Pantanal, in Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, creating jobs and financing research.

In August 2018, a jaguar cub staggered into the courtyard of a school on the banks of the Paraguay River. The researchers rescued the jaguar and took it to the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS). It was skin and bones.

“This animal had strayed from its mother and was not able to hunt in the wild”, explained veterinarian Gedielson Araújo, from UFMS.

It spent a semester in intensive care and several tests were performed, but before being released back into the Pantanal, it will be kept in a special area to familiarize itself with the surroundings.

“At first we will introduce a young capybara. If it learns how to hunt and knows that it is food, we will increase the degree of difficulty,” explained biologist Lilian Rampim, coordinator of the Onçafari project.

In nature, the female jaguar remains with her cubs for up to a year and a half. This is when she teaches her youngsters how to hunt. However, when these cubs grow up in captivity, far from their mother, they do not learn how to make it on their own. So, this is the challenge for researchers: to arouse the wilderness instinct in inexperienced jaguars.

An enclosure was built for this purpose. The fences are four and a half meters high; no one is allowed to come near them and cameras provide monitoring. This is 10,000 square meters of native swampland, where the jaguars will learn to be wild again.